Novel Stigmergy Structures in the Internet

The Web is a vast collection of software
organisms. Novel stigmergy structures are growing in the
Internet and exerting their organizing power in new ways.

The vast messaging structure called the
Internet harbors many self-organizing multicellular digital
structures. More evolve every year. And multitudes of "single
cell" devices, PCs, laptops, iPod/Pad/Phones, Android smart
phones, and various sensor and effector devices communicate with
the many digital stigmergy structures discussed below.

Linux source code, for example, is a relatively new kind of digital stigmergy structure that can
be thought of as a software
termite mound. Linux's source code is organized by the
“blessed” Concurrent Versions System (CVS) repository that is
under the control of the Linux “inner circle” (Linus Torvalds,
Alan Cox, etc). Clearly, the Linux CVS code tree is both built
by, and helps to organize the efforts of, the worldwide
community of Linux programmers. Classic stigmergy! The
Open-Source revolution that gave us Linux, Apache, MySQL,
Mozilla/Firefox and OpenOffice depends upon such open,
distributed software stigmergy structures.

The Internet supports many other public stigmergy structures
that are collectively managed and used by humanity[1].
The entire Web is itself a distributed stigmergy structure
constantly being modified and constantly influencing the
organization of the humans and computers that use it. The Web as
a whole is a living digital stigmergy structure.

Examples of emergent digital stigmergy structures in the
Internet include:

Google and other search sites - consisting of crawlers,
databases and servers. These search sites create and maintain
meta-level stigmergy structures (the crawler data) that adapt
to the changing content and cross linking structure of the Web
and page-rank algorithms that adapt to the way query results
are followed by users and manipulated content creators. These
constantly changing structures in turn affect both the
browsing and the remodeling of the Web. The task of keeping
up-to-date metadata is massive. Google manages their metadata
stigmergy structure(s) on upwards of two million stripped-down
Linux servers organized in a
multi-cellular
(distributed) architecture. The distributed architecture
includes apoptosis
mechanisms for identifying and removing failed servers.

Twitter - a case of a self-organizing system built upon a
preexisting data and communication structure. It is an
organization layer based, at least initially, upon cell phone
SMS text messages. Texting itself is an organization layer
proposed in 1985 over an already existing secondary low
bandwidth radio channel between cell-phones and cell towers
that had been used only to communicate data to phones about
reception strength and to supply them with information about
incoming calls. In 1985, the GSM telephony standards
committee, led by Friedhelm Hillebrand,
proposed the 160 character text message protocols. Twitter is now used
over the Web on media other than just cell-phone texting. And
a large searchable database of tweets has been accumulating --
it is, in effect the digital world's diary. It will be
archived forever by the US Library of Congress. On April 14,
2010, @librarycongress tweeted, “Library to acquire ENTIRE
Twitter archives - All public tweets, ever, since March 2006!”
The archives are quite large. Twitter processes more than 50
million tweets every day.

MMORPGs - Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
such as World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Second Life, and many
others are based on servers that maintain "models" (in the
Model-View-Controller sense) acting as the stigmergy
structures around which tens of thousands of online gamers
organize their play. The game model is altered in real-time by
the behavior of the players and the player's behavior is
altered by the constantly changing model. WoW has at least 6.5
million users and claim that they have supported over 250
thousand simultaneous users.

Instant messaging communities (AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and others)
where the stigmergy structure is the “presence registry” that
tracks who is online at any given moment. By the act of
logging-in to an Instant Messaging community, each user
deposits information into the stigmergy structure: the IP
address of the users machine and perhaps other status
information e.g., do-not-disturb. Their community of friends
can know that they are now accessible. People who use instant
messaging recognize how their behavior is modified by being
aware in "real time" of their friend's and colleague's online
presence.

Public databases. For example, most medical and post-genomic
bioinformatics research world-wide is completely dependent
upon public databases such as GenBank, PDB, Pub Med, and BIND[2].
Most academic and/or public affairs disciplines, where data is
usually assumed to be a public good, have similar sorts of
communities organized around major databases. These databases,
are stigmergy structures in which the data is updated by the
users and, in turn, helps to organize the subsequent behavior
of those same users. The databases often support easy-to-use,
yet sophisticated domain-specific search functions. Social
incentives, such as mandates by granting agencies are
encouraging researchers to put their new data into these
databases and most researchers focus much of their activity
around use of that public data.

Free VOIP and video conferencing services (e.g., Skype) are
similar to instant messaging communities except that they
communicate with higher bandwidth voice or video in addition
to text messages. The stigmergy structure includes not only a
presence registry, but also may use the combined bandwidth of
the users machines in a peer-to-peer model.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks (e.g., BitTorrent),
construct a virtual distributed stigmergy structure supported
by a constantly shifting collection of client machines with
the appropriate set of P2P message APIs. Each participating
machine makes available some files. Together they collaborate
to maintain an ever-changing distributed presence registry
that enables individual machines to search out desired files.
Music file sharing communities, together with end user
iPod/iPhone devices, have reshaped the way people relate to
music and thus reshaped the entire music industry. They
threaten to do the same for the movie industry.

Blogs and Wikis are other examples of public stigmergy
“selves.” Wikipedia, created and maintained by users all over
the world has made old-fashioned encyclopedias obsolete. It's
stigmergy structure evolves minute-by-minute, 24 hours a day,
as the human "termites" add and modify its pages. The content
is supported and served by more
than 120 servers running Linux and Apache.

Social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook an many
others help form and organize human digital virtual 'social'
groups. Their stigmergy structures include the database of
users and links between users, as well as the data the users
enter. Individual users see value in the content provided by
their "friends" or other contacts and perhaps the status of
claiming a large group of "friends" or contacts. But
marketers, political campaigners, and intelligence analysts
find much more value in analyzing properties of the networks
themselves using Social
Network Analysis.

"folksonomy"
sites such as Flikr and del.icio.us collect and organize tags
for unstructured data. Folksonomy stigmergy structures
consists of both the data (e.g., photos or bookmarks) and the
database of tags that support search. Thus, while the data and
the tags are each stigmergy structures, their interdependence
strengthens both.

Note that all of these novel communities are organized around
new stigmergy structures, i.e., new digital selves, of a sort
that didn’t exist previously. Their worldwide scope, speed, and
enablement of new kinds of interaction emerge out of the scope,
speed, and protean flexibility of the Internet. They also
typically operate in a climate that is diametrically opposed to
the corporate tendencies to hoard and leverage secret or
proprietary knowledge.

Open Internet-based systems mutate and grow by the
self-organizing activity of large numbers of users that share a
stigmergy structure. They mutate and evolve more rapidly than
corporate IT infrastructures. For example, P2P networks grow
organically because their infrastructure grows at the same rate
as their “customer” base. Each user contributes some resources
to the network in exchange for participating in the network.
Thus Skype, a free VOIP network, grew very rapidly in its early
stages with almost no expenditure of its own resources while the
Telcos struggled to adapt. Similarly, public databases, once
accepted in their relevant communities, can grow much more
rapidly than can a competing proprietary database. Many a
bioinformatics startup company has found it impossible to
provide proprietary for-fee databases in competition with free
public databases.

[1]
“humanity” is an overstatement. Only the digitally connected
can participate. But cell-phones are making dramatic inroads
in rural Africa and India, and smart-phones will eventualy
follow. The reach of the net is threatened, however, by
attempts to balkanize the Internet into censored and
controlled subnets, e.g., in countries such as Singapore,
China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and Iran.